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UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

fortune.com

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Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#271

Post by tptacek »

SilasX wrote: post #248
ceejayoz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare here isn't 4x the price because of doctor costs, either. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/04/doctor-pa... / https://archive.is/ZBRMx > Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs. > “People have a narrative that physician e…

Exactly. Even if you forced doctor compensation down to the level of other countries, that's, what, a 6% overall reduction, at best? Wow, so now when you get a surprise bill for $5000, it'll instead be $4700 instead! Hooray! We did it, Reddit/HN! Does anyone think American healthcare was thereby fixed? I don't! Now, FWIW, I'm happy to accept that US doctors are overpaid, and that there are feasible ways to make progr…

Now do the math on how much you'd save if you zeroed out health insurance costs.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#272

Post by tptacek »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #265
tptacek wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really just have two things to say on this subthread: * Medicare would not have 2% overhead if it served 30-year-olds. * Medicare is in fact the primary constraint on the supply of doctors in the US system.

Medicare would not have 2% overhead if it served 30-year-olds. Swing and a miss. Medicare does cover 30 year olds, you just have to be sick enough to qualify. So in fact Medicare covers the least profitable young folks. Edit since responding to your prolific bad faith arguments got me throttled: Your argument is that younger people would magically add to the overhead incurred by Medicare. My point is that Medicare's…

I don't think this point is helping your argument the way you think it is.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#273

Post by bugglebeetle »

nradov wrote: post #260
bugglebeetle wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets even better (quoting from ceejayoz down-thread): >UHC is the largest single employer of doctors in the US. https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/25/united-health-group-medi ... > It’s no secret that UnitedHealth is a colossus: It’s the country’s largest health insurer and the fourth-largest company of any type by revenue, just behind Apple. And thanks to a series of stealthy deals, almost 1 in 10 U.S. doctors — so…

For better or worse, the incentives created by federal legislation since the 1940s make this healthcare industry consolidation and vertical integration inevitable. Payers (insurers) have been merging to gain more negotiating power over provider rates and hold down medical costs. So provider organizations have reacted by consolidating themselves to maintain their negotiating power and keep rates high. Increased costs…

>the logical next step is for payers to vertically integrate and bring more care in house where they can better control cost and quality.

…except you skipped over the part where UHC billed at higher rates for the clinics they own so they could screw customers with premium hikes, take a bigger percentage of of the inflated bills, as well as profit from whatever costs they didn’t cover and people were forced to pay.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#274

Post by wat10000 »

mindslight wrote: post #270
wat10000 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two paths. Having the government be a payer of last resort for emergency services starts you down the road of paying for more and more things. You’ll start asking questions like, why are we paying massive amounts to stabilize a poor, terminal cancer patient who collapsed when we could have paid 10x less on screening and early treatment? Why aren’t we paying for procedures that allow people to work a…

I don't agree with this dichotomy. It asserts a monolithic top-down perspective, making it completely inapplicable to the dynamic I described in my last paragraph. It's "universal care" only in the sense that its universe has been defined to exclude most patient agency. Divergence from other possible patient-desired choices then tends to get rationalized away. For example, perhaps having a follow up after 6 months on…

It sounds like you’re talking about what you want, and I’m talking about how I think things are. I don’t see a wealthy country being able to do anything other than some form of universal care with heavy government involvement in the industry to make it happen. There’s nothing preventing it in terms of economics or technology, I just don’t think people will accept it.

Most of these systems do allow that sort of patient agency for those who can afford it, though. Maybe you had a weird specialist who didn’t want to see you earlier, but there are plenty of doctors who will go beyond your insurance coverage in exchange for cash.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#275

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #271
SilasX wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Even if you forced doctor compensation down to the level of other countries, that's, what, a 6% overall reduction, at best? Wow, so now when you get a surprise bill for $5000, it'll instead be $4700 instead! Hooray! We did it, Reddit/HN! Does anyone think American healthcare was thereby fixed? I don't! Now, FWIW, I'm happy to accept that US doctors are overpaid, and that there are feasible ways to make progr…

Now do the math on how much you'd save if you zeroed out health insurance costs.

[deleted]

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#276

Post by sweeter »

the only option to fix healthcare is to decommodify it and implement a public option where the risk pool includes everyone. There is 0 reason that the wealthiest country on the planet needs to operate at a worse level than so called "3rd world countries"

even from a purely neo-Liberal capitalist sense, this completely violates the shared fantasy of the "free market" and yet we still have people going on Joe Rogan saying stuff like "we need to deregulate the market further because this is all due to innovation being stifled through regulation" which is an absurd notion.

Every other country is eating our lunch when it comes to medical discovery and novel chemical compound discovery while the US spends all of its time and money evergreening medical patents to extend them indefinitely so they can maintain monopolistic control. I honestly just don't see a way out of this.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#277

Post by inferiorhuman »

tptacek wrote: post #271
SilasX wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Even if you forced doctor compensation down to the level of other countries, that's, what, a 6% overall reduction, at best? Wow, so now when you get a surprise bill for $5000, it'll instead be $4700 instead! Hooray! We did it, Reddit/HN! Does anyone think American healthcare was thereby fixed? I don't! Now, FWIW, I'm happy to accept that US doctors are overpaid, and that there are feasible ways to make progr…

Now do the math on how much you'd save if you zeroed out health insurance costs.

Does that include the artificially bloated cost of care (compared to e.g. Medicare), the costs of Medicare Part D fraud, and the costs of having care denied and delayed (2–3x the claim denial rate of Medicare) or just the premiums?

Last time we did this song and dance you doubled down on incorrect assumptions about how Medicare functions. So, no, it's not likely I'll come to the same conclusions as you.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#279

Post by tptacek »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #277
tptacek wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now do the math on how much you'd save if you zeroed out health insurance costs.

Does that include the artificially bloated cost of care (compared to e.g. Medicare), the costs of Medicare Part D fraud, and the costs of having care denied and delayed (2–3x the claim denial rate of Medicare) or just the premiums? Last time we did this song and dance you doubled down on incorrect assumptions about how Medicare functions. So, no, it's not likely I'll come to the same conclusions as you.

Go ahead and do it any way you'd like, show your work, and I think you're going to reach the same conclusion about how silly this is.

Re: UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%

#280

Post by tptacek »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #265
tptacek wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really just have two things to say on this subthread: * Medicare would not have 2% overhead if it served 30-year-olds. * Medicare is in fact the primary constraint on the supply of doctors in the US system.

Medicare would not have 2% overhead if it served 30-year-olds. Swing and a miss. Medicare does cover 30 year olds, you just have to be sick enough to qualify. So in fact Medicare covers the least profitable young folks. Edit since responding to your prolific bad faith arguments got me throttled: Your argument is that younger people would magically add to the overhead incurred by Medicare. My point is that Medicare's…

I think the issue here is that you don't understand my argument. Fixed prices, floating costs. Do the math. Your point would make sense if 30 year olds paid something differently than 65-year olds.
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